This thin volume (just 232 pages in the hardcover edition, only
around 125 of which are the main text and appendices—the
rest being extensive source citations, notes, and indices of
subjects and people and place names) is intended as the
introduction to an envisioned three volume work on Sparta
covering its history from the archaic period through the
second
battle of Mantinea in 362 b.c.
where defeat of a Sparta-led alliance at the hands of the
Thebans paved the way for the Macedonian conquest of Sparta.

In this work, the author adopts the approach to political
science used in antiquity by writers such as Thucydides,
Xenophon, and Aristotle: that the principal factor in
determining the character of a political community is
its constitution, or form of government, the rules
which define membership in the community and which
its members were expected to obey, their
character being largely determined by the system of
education and moral formation which shape the citizens
of the community.

Discerning these characteristics in any ancient society is
difficult, but especially so in the case of Sparta, which
was a society of warriors, not philosophers and historians.
Almost all of the contemporary information we have about
Sparta comes from outsiders who either visited the city at
various times in its history or based their work upon the
accounts of others who had. Further, the Spartans were
famously secretive about the details of their society, so
when ancient accounts differ, it is difficult to determine
which, if any, is correct. One gets the sense that all of
the direct documentary information we have about Sparta would
fit on one floppy disc: everything else is interpretations
based upon that meagre foundation. In recent centuries,
scholars studying Sparta have seen it as everything from
the prototype of constitutional liberty to a precursor of
modern day militaristic totalitarianism.

Another challenge facing the modern reader and, one suspects,
many ancients, in understanding Sparta was how profoundly
weird it was. On several occasions whilst reading
the book, I was struck that rarely in science fiction does one
encounter a description of a society so thoroughly
alien to those with which we are accustomed from our own
experience or a study of history. First of all,
Sparta was tiny: there were never as many as ten
thousand full-fledged citizens. These citizens
were descended from Dorians who had invaded the
Peloponnese in the archaic period and subjugated the original
inhabitants, who became
helots: essentially
serfs who worked the estates of the Spartan aristocracy in
return for half of the crops they produced (about the same
fraction of the fruit of their labour the helots of our modern
enlightened self-governing societies are allowed to retain
for their own use). Every full citizen, or Spartiate,
was a warrior, trained from boyhood to that end. Spartiates
not only did not engage in trade or work as craftsmen: they were
forbidden to do so—such work was performed by non-citizens.
With the helots outnumbering Spartiates by a factor of from
four to seven (and even more as the Spartan population shrunk
toward the end), the fear of an uprising was ever-present, and
required maintenance of martial prowess among the Spartiates
and subjugation of the helots.

How were these warriors formed? Boys were taken from their
families at the age of seven and placed in a barracks with others
of their age. Henceforth, they would return to their families only
as visitors. They were subjected to a regime of physical and
mental training, including exercise, weapons training, athletics,
mock warfare, plus music and dancing. They learned the poetry,
legends, and history of the city. All learned to read and
write. After intense scrutiny and regular tests, the young
man would face a rite of passage,
krupteίa,
in which, for a full year, armed only with a dagger, he had to
survive on his own in the wild, stealing what he needed, and
instilling fear among the helots, who he was authorised to
kill if found in violation of curfew. Only after surviving this
ordeal would the young Spartan be admitted as a member of a
sussιtίon,
a combination of a men's club, a military mess, and the basic unit
in the Spartan army. A Spartan would remain a member of this
same group all his life and, even after marriage and fatherhood,
would live and dine with them every day until the age of
forty-five.

From the age of twelve, boys in training would usually have
a patron, or surrogate father, who was expected to initiate
him into the world of the warrior and instruct him in the
duties of citizenship. It was expected that there would be
a homosexual relationship between the two, and that this would
further cement the bond of loyalty to his brothers in arms. Upon
becoming a full citizen and warrior, the young man was
expected to take on a boy and continue the tradition. As
to many modern utopian social engineers, the family was seen
as an obstacle to the citizen's identification with the
community (or, in modern terminology, the state), and the
entire process of raising citizens seems to have been designed
to transfer this inherent biological solidarity with kin to
peers in the army and the community as a whole.

The political structure which sustained and, in turn, was
sustained by these cultural institutions was similarly
alien and intricate—so much so that I found myself
wishing that Professor Rahe had included a diagram to help
readers understand all of the moving parts and how
they interacted. After finishing the book, I found this one
on Wikipedia.

The actual relationships are even more complicated and subtle
than expressed in this diagram, and given the extent to which
scholars dispute the details of the Spartan political institutions
(which occupy many pages in the end notes), it is likely
the author may find fault with some aspects of this illustration.
I present it purely because it provides a glimpse of the
complexity and helped me organise my thoughts about the
description in the text.

Start with the kings. That's right, “kings”—there
were two of them—both traditionally descended from
Hercules, but through different lineages. The kings shared power and
acted as a check on each other. They were commanders of the army
in time of war, and high priests in peace. The kingship was hereditary
and for life.

Five overseers, or ephors were elected annually by the citizens
as a whole. Scholars dispute whether ephors could serve more than
one term, but the author notes that no ephor is known to have done
so, and it is thus likely they were term limited to a single year.
During their year in office, the board of five ephors (one from each
of the villages of Sparta) exercised almost unlimited power in both
domestic and foreign affairs. Even the kings were not immune to their
power: the ephors could arrest a king and bring him to trial on a
capital charge just like any other citizen, and this happened. On
the other hand, at the end of their one year term, ephors were
subject to a judicial examination of their acts in office and
liable for misconduct. (Wouldn't be great if present-day “public
servants” received the same kind of scrutiny at the end of
their terms in office? It would be interesting to see what a
prosecutor could discover about how so many of these solons manage
to amass great personal fortunes incommensurate with their salaries.)
And then there was the “fickle meteor of doom” rule.

Every ninth year, the five [ephors] chose a clear and moonless
night and remained awake to watch the sky. If they saw a
shooting star, they judged that one or both kings had acted
against the law and suspended the man or men from office. Only
the intervention of Delphi or Olympia could effect a
restoration.

The ephors could also summon the council of elders, or
gerousίa,
into session. This body was made up of thirty men: the two kings, plus
twenty-eight others, all sixty years or older, who were elected for
life by the citizens. They tended to be wealthy aristocrats from
the oldest families, and were seen as protectors of the stability
of the city from the passions of youth and the ambition of kings.
They proposed legislation to the general assembly of all citizens,
and could veto its actions. They also acted as a supreme court in
capital cases. The general assembly of all citizens, which could
also be summoned by the ephors, was restricted to an up or down
vote on legislation proposed by the elders, and, perhaps, on
sentences of death passed by the ephors and elders.

All of this may seem confusing, if not downright baroque,
especially for a community which, in the modern world, would be
considered a medium-sized town. Once again, it's something which,
if you encountered it in a science fiction novel, you might expect
the result of a
Golden
Age author, paid by the word, making ends meet by
inventing fairy castles of politics. But this is how Sparta seems
to have worked (again, within the limits of that single floppy disc
we have to work with, and with almost every detail a matter of dispute
among those who have spent their careers studying Sparta over the
millennia). Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which was the product of
a group of people toiling over a hot summer in Philadelphia, the
Spartan constitution, like that of Britain, evolved
organically over centuries, incorporating tradition, the consequences
of events, experience, and cultural evolution. And, like the
British constitution, it was unwritten. But it incorporated, among all
its complexity and ambiguity, something very important, which can be
seen as a milestone in humankind's millennia-long struggle against
arbitrary authority and quest for individual liberty: the separation
of powers. Unlike almost all other political systems in antiquity
and all too many today, there was no pyramid with a king, priest,
dictator, judge, or even popular assembly at the top. Instead,
there was a complicated network of responsibility, in which any
individual player or institution could be called to account by
others. The regimentation, destruction of the family, obligatory
homosexuality, indoctrination of the youth into identification with
the collective, foundation of the society's economics on serfdom,
suppression of individual initiative and innovation were, indeed,
almost a model for the most dystopian of modern tyrannies, yet darned
if they didn't get the separation of powers right! We owe much of
what remains of our liberties to that heritage.

Although this is a short book and this is a lengthy review, there is
much more here to merit your attention and consideration. It's a
chore getting through the end notes, as much of them are source
citations in the dense jargon of classical scholars, but embedded
therein are interesting discussions and asides which expand upon
the text.

In the Kindle edition, all of the citations and
index references are properly linked to the text. Some Greek
letters with double diacritical marks are rendered as images
and look odd embedded in text; I don't know if they appear correctly
in print editions.

In 1895, a young struggling writer who earned his precarious
living by writing short humorous pieces for London magazines,
often published without a byline, buckled down and penned his
first long work, a longish novella of some 33,000 words. When
published, H. G. Wells's
The
Time Machine would not only help to found a new
literary genre—science fiction, but would introduce a
entirely new concept to storytelling: time travel.
Many of the themes of modern fiction can be traced to the
myths of antiquity, but here was something entirely new:
imagining a voyage to the future to see how current trends
would develop, or back into the past, perhaps not just to
observe history unfold and resolve its persistent mysteries,
but possibly to change the past, opening the door to paradoxes
which have been the subject not only of a multitude of
subsequent stories but theories and speculation by serious
scientists. So new was the concept of travel through time that
the phrase “time travel” first appeared in the
English language only in 1914, in a reference to Wells's story.

For much of human history, there was little concept of a linear
progression of time. People lived lives much the same as those
of their ancestors, and expected their descendants to inhabit
much the same kind of world. Their lives seemed to be
governed by a series of cycles: day and night, the phases of
the Moon, the seasons, planting and harvesting, and
successive generations of humans, rather than the
ticking of an inexorable clock. Even great disruptive
events such as wars, plagues, and natural disasters seemed
to recur over time, even if not on a regular, predictable
schedule. This led to the philosophical view of
“eternal
return”, which appears in many ancient cultures
and in Western philosophy from Pythagoras to Neitzsche.
In mathematics, the
Poincaré
recurrence theorem formally demonstrated that an isolated
finite system will eventually (although possibly only after a
time much longer than the age of the universe), return to a given
state and repeat its evolution an infinite number of times.

But nobody (except perhaps a philosopher) who had lived through
the 19th century in Britain could really believe that. Over the
space of a human lifetime, the world and the human condition had
changed radically and seemed to be careening into a future
difficult to envision. Steam power, railroads, industrialisation
of manufacturing, the telegraph and telephone, electricity and
the electric light, anaesthesia, antiseptics, steamships and
global commerce, submarine cables and near-instantaneous
international communications, had all remade the world. The
idea of progress
was not just an abstract concept of the Enlightenment, but something
anybody could see all around them.

But progress through what? In the
fin de siècle milieu
that Wells inhabited, through time: a scroll of history
being written continually by new ideas, inventions, creative
works, and the social changes flowing from these
events which changed the future in profound and often
unknowable ways. The intellectual landscape was fertile
for utopian ideas, many of which Wells championed. Among
the intellectual élite, the fourth dimension was
much in vogue, often a fourth spatial dimension but also the
concept of time as a dimension comparable to those of space.
This concept first appears in the work of Edgar Allan Poe
in 1848, but was fully fleshed out by Wells in The
Time Machine: “ ‘Clearly,’ the
Time Traveller proceeded, ‘any real body must have
extension in four dimensions: it must have Length,
Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration.’ ”
But if we can move freely through the three spatial directions
(although less so in the vertical in Wells's day than the
present), why cannot we also move back and forth in time,
unshackling our consciousness and will from the tyranny of
the timepiece just as the railroad, steamship, and telegraph
had loosened the constraints of locality?

Just ten years after The Time Machine, Einstein's
special theory of
relativity resolved puzzles in electrodynamics and
mechanics by demonstrating that time and space mixed
depending upon the relative states of motion of observers.
In 1908, Hermann
Minkowski reformulated Einstein's theory in terms of
a four dimensional space-time. He declared, “Henceforth
space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away
into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will
preserve an independent reality.” (Einstein was,
initially, less than impressed with this view, calling it
“überflüssige
Gelehrsamkeit”: superfluous learnedness, but
eventually accepted the perspective and made it central to
his 1915 theory of gravitation.) But further, embedded within
special relativity, was time travel—at least into
the future.

According to the equations of special relativity, which have been
experimentally verified as precisely as anything in science and
are fundamental to the operation of everyday technologies such
as the Global Positioning System, a moving observer will measure
time to flow more slowly than a stationary observer. We don't
observe this effect in everyday life because the phenomenon only
becomes pronounced at velocities which are a substantial fraction
of the speed of light, but even at the modest velocity of orbiting
satellites, it cannot be neglected. Due to this effect of
time dilation,
if you had a space ship
able to accelerate at a constant rate of one Earth gravity
(people on board would experience the same gravity as they do
while standing on the Earth's surface), you would be able to
travel from the Earth to the Andromeda galaxy and back to
Earth, a distance of around four million light years, in a
time, measured by the ship's clock and your own subjective and
biological perception of time, in less than six and a half years.
But when you arrived back at the Earth, you'd discover that in
its reference frame, more than four million years of time would
have elapsed. What wonders would our descendants have accomplished
in that distant future, or would they be digging for grubs with
blunt sticks while living in a sustainable utopia having finally thrown
off the shackles of race, class, and gender which make our present
civilisation a living Hell?

This is genuine time travel into the future and, although it's
far beyond our present technological capabilities, it violates no law of
physics and, to a more modest yet still measurable degree,
happens every time you travel in an automobile or airplane. But
what about travel into the past? Travel into the future doesn't
pose any potential paradoxes. It's entirely equivalent to going
into hibernation and awaking after a long sleep—indeed,
this is a frequently-used literary device in fiction depicting
the future. Travel into the past is another thing entirely. For
example, consider the
grandfather
paradox: suppose you have a time machine able to transport
you into the past. You go back in time and kill your own
grandfather (it's never the grandmother—beats me). Then
who are you, and how did you come into existence in the first
place? The grandfather paradox exists whenever altering an
event in the past changes conditions in the future so as to be
inconsistent with the alteration of that event.

Or consider the bootstrap paradox or
causal loop.
An elderly mathematician (say, age 39), having struggled for
years and finally succeeded in proving a difficult theorem,
travels back in time and provides a key hint to his twenty year
old self to set him on the path to the proof—the same
hint he remembers finding on his desk that morning so many
years before. Where did the idea come from? In 1991, physicist
David Deutsch demonstrated that a computer incorporating
travel back in time (formally, a
closed
timelike curve) could solve
NP problems
in
polynomial
time. I wonder where he got that idea….

All of this would be academic were time travel into the past
just a figment of fictioneers' imagination. This has been the
view of many scientists, and the
chronology
protection conjecture asserts that the laws of physics conspire
to prevent travel to the past which, in the words of a 1992 paper
by Stephen Hawking, “makes the universe safe for historians.”
But the laws of physics, as we understand them today, do not rule
out travel into the past! Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity,
which so far has withstood every experimental test for over a century,
admits solutions, such as the
Gödel metric,
discovered in 1949 by Einstein's friend and colleague
Kurt Gödel,
which contain closed timelike curves. In the Gödel universe, which
consists of a homogeneous sea of dust particles, rotating around
a centre point and with a nonzero cosmological constant, it is possible,
by travelling on a closed path and never reaching or exceeding the speed of
light, to return to a point in one's own past. Now, the Gödel
solution is highly contrived, and there is no evidence that it
describes the universe we actually inhabit, but the existence of such
a solution leaves the door open that somewhere in the other exotica of
general relativity such as spinning black holes, wormholes, naked
singularities, or cosmic strings, there may be a loophole which allows
travel into the past. If you discover one, could you please pop back and
send me an E-mail about it before I finish this review?

This book is far more about the literary and cultural history of
time travel than scientific explorations of its possibility and
consequences. Thinking about time travel forces one to confront
questions which can usually be swept under the rug: is the future
ours to change, or do we inhabit a
block
universe where our perception of time is just a delusion as
the cursor of our consciousness sweeps out a path in a space-time
whose future is entirely determined by its past? If we have free
will, where does it come from, when according to the laws of
physics the future can be computed entirely from the past? If
we can change the future, why not the past? If we changed the past,
would it change the present for those living in it, or create a fork
in the time line along which a different history would develop?
All of these speculations are rich veins to be mined in literature
and drama, and are explored here. Many technical topics are discussed
only briefly, if at all, for example the
Wheeler-Feynman
absorber theory, which resolves a mystery in electrodynamics
by positing a symmetrical solution to Maxwell's equations in which
the future influences the past just as the present influences the
future. Gleick doesn't go anywhere near my own
experiments with retrocausality or
the “presponse” experiments of investigators
such as
Dick Bierman
and Dean Radin.
I get it—pop culture beats woo-woo on the bestseller list.

The question of time has puzzled people for millennia. Only recently
have we thought seriously about travel in time and its implications
for our place in the universe. Time travel has been, and will doubtless
continue to be the source of speculation and entertainment, and this
book is an excellent survey of its short history as a genre of
fiction and the science upon which its founded.

By the mid-21st century, the Internet has become largely
subsumed as the transport layer for the OASIS (Ontologically
Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), a massively
multiuser online virtual reality environment originally
developed as a multiplayer game, but which rapidly evolved into
a platform for commerce, education, social interaction, and
entertainment used by billions of people around the world. The
OASIS supports immersive virtual reality, limited only by the
user's budget for hardware used to access the network. With
top-of-the-line visors and sound systems, body motion sensors,
and
haptic
feedback, coupled to a powerful interface console, a
highly faithful experience was possible. The OASIS was the
creation of James Halliday, a legendary super-nerd who made
his first fortune designing videogames for home computers in
the 1980s, and then re-launched his company in 2012 as
Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS), with the OASIS as
its sole product. The OASIS was entirely open source: users
could change things within the multitude of worlds within
the system (within the limits set by those who created them),
or create their own new worlds. Using a distributed computing
architecture which pushed much of the processing power to the
edge of the network, on users' own consoles, the system was
able to grow without bound without requiring commensurate
growth in GSS data centres. And it was free, or
almost so. To access the OASIS, you paid only a one-time
lifetime sign-up fee of twenty-five cents, just like the quarter
you used to drop into the slot of an arcade videogame. Users
paid nothing to use the OASIS itself: their only costs were the
hardware they used to connect (which varied widely in cost and
quality of the experience) and the bandwidth to connect to the
network. But since most of the processing was done locally,
the latter cost was modest. GSS made its money selling or
renting virtual real estate (“surreal estate”)
within the simulation. If you wanted to open, say, a shopping
mall or build your own Fortress of Solitude on an asteroid,
you had to pay GSS for the territory. GSS also sold virtual
goods: clothes, magical artefacts, weapons, vehicles of all
kinds, and buildings. Most were modestly priced, but since
they cost nothing to manufacture, were pure profit to the
company.

As the OASIS permeated society, GSS prospered. Halliday remained
the majority shareholder in the company, having bought back
the share once owned by his co-founder and partner Ogden (“Og”)
Morrow, after what was rumoured to be a dispute between the
two the details of which had never been revealed. By 2040, Halliday's
fortune, almost all in GSS stock, had grown to more than
two hundred and forty billion dollars. And then, after fifteen
years of self-imposed isolation which some said was due to
insanity, Halliday died of cancer. He was a bachelor, with no
living relatives, no heirs, and, it was said, no friends. His
death was announced on the OASIS in a five minute video
titled Anaorak's Invitation (“Anorak”
was the name of Halliday's all-powerful avatar within
the OASIS). In the film, Halliday announces that his will
places his entire fortune in escrow
until somebody completes the quest he has programmed within
the OASIS:

Three hidden keys open three secret gates,
Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits,
And those with the skill to survive these straits,
Will reach The End where the prize awaits.

The prize is Halliday's entire fortune and, with it, super-user
control of the principal medium of human interaction, business,
and even politics. Before fading out, Halliday shows three
keys: copper, jade, and crystal, which must be obtained to
open the three gates. Only after passing through the gates
and passing the tests within them, will the intrepid paladin
obtain the Easter egg hidden within the OASIS and gain control
of it. Halliday provided a link to Anorak's Almanac,
more than a thousand pages of journal entries made during his
life, many of which reflect his obsession with 1980s
popular culture, science fiction and fantasy, videogames,
movies, music, and comic books. The clues to finding the keys and
the Egg were widely believed to be within this rambling,
disjointed document.

Given the stakes, and the contest's being open to anybody in the
OASIS, what immediately came to be called the Hunt became a
social phenomenon, all-consuming to some. Egg hunters, or
“gunters”, immersed themselves in Halliday's journal
and every pop culture reference within it, however obscure.
All of this material was freely available on the OASIS, and
gunters memorised every detail of anything which had caught
Halliday's attention. As time passed, and nobody succeeded in
finding even the copper key (Halliday's memorial site displayed
a scoreboard of those who achieved goals in the Hunt, so far
blank), many lost interest in the Hunt, but a dedicated hard
core persisted, often to the exclusion of all other diversions.
Some gunters banded together into “clans”, some
very large, agreeing to exchange information and, if one found the
Egg, to share the proceeds with all members. More sinister were the
activities of Innovative Online Industries—IOI—a
global Internet and communications company which controlled
much of the backbone that underlay the OASIS. It had assembled
a large team of paid employees, backed by the
research and database facilities of IOI, with their sole
mission to find the Egg and turn control of the OASIS over
to IOI. These players, all with identical avatars and names
consisting of their six-digit IOI employee numbers, all of which
began with the digit “6”, were called “sixers”
or, more often in the gunter argot, “Sux0rz”.

Gunters detested IOI and the sixers, because it was no secret
that if they found the Egg, IOI's intention was to close the
architecture of the OASIS, begin to charge fees for access,
plaster everything with advertising, destroy anonymity, snoop
indiscriminately, and use their monopoly power to put their
thumb on the scale of all forms of communication including
political discourse. (Fortunately, that couldn't happen to us
with today's enlightened, progressive Silicon Valley overlords.)
But IOI's financial resources were such that whenever a rare and
powerful magical artefact (many of which had been created by
Halliday in the original OASIS, usually requiring the completion
of a quest to obtain, but freely transferrable thereafter) came
up for auction, IOI was usually able to outbid even the largest
gunter clans and add it to their arsenal.

Wade Watts, a lone gunter whose avatar is named Parzival, became
obsessed with the Hunt on the day of Halliday's death, and,
years later, devotes almost every minute of his life not spent
sleeping or in school (like many, he attends school in the
OASIS, and is now in the last year of high school) on the Hunt,
reading and re-reading Anorak's Almanac, reading,
listening to, playing, and viewing everything mentioned therein,
to the extent he can recite the dialogue of the movies from
memory. He makes copious notes in his “grail
diary”, named after the one kept by Indiana Jones. His
friends, none of whom he has ever met in person, are all gunters
who congregate on-line in virtual reality chat rooms such as
that run by his best friend, Aech.

Then, one day, bored to tears and daydreaming in Latin class,
Parzival has a flash of insight. Putting together a message
buried in the Almanac that he and many other
gunters had discovered but failed to understand, with a bit
of Latin and his encyclopedic knowledge of role playing games,
he decodes the clue and, after a demanding test, finds
himself in possession of the Copper Key. His name, alone, now
appears at the top of the scoreboard, with 10,000 points.
The path to the First Gate was now open.

Discovery of the Copper Key was a sensation: suddenly Parzival,
a humble level 10 gunter, is a worldwide celebrity (although
his real identity remains unknown, as he refuses all media offers
which would reveal or compromise it). Knowing that the key can
be found re-energises other gunters, not to speak of IOI, and
Parzival's footprints in the OASIS are scrupulously examined for
clues to his achievement. (Finding a key and opening a gate
does not render it unavailable to others. Those who subsequently
pass the tests will receive their own copies of the key, although
there is a point bonus for finding it first.)

So begins an epic quest by Parzival and other gunters,
contending with the evil minions of IOI, whose potential gain is
so high and ethics so low that the risks may extend beyond the
OASIS into the real world. For the reader, it is a nostalgic
romp through every aspect of the popular culture of the 1980s:
the formative era of personal computing and gaming. The level
of detail is just staggering: this may be the geekiest nerdfest
ever published. Heck, there's even a reference to an erstwhile
Autodesk employee! The only goof I noted is a mention of the
“screech of a 300-baud modem during the log-in
sequence”. Three hundred baud modems did not have the
characteristic squawk and screech sync-up of faster modems which
employ
trellis
coding. While there are a multitude of references to details
which will make people who were there, then, smile, readers who
were not immersed in the 1980s and/or less familiar with its
cultural minutiæ can still enjoy the challenges, puzzles
solved, intrigue, action, and epic virtual reality battles
which make up the chronicle of the Hunt. The conclusion is
particularly satisfying: there may be a bigger world than even
the OASIS.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia in 1969. In 1992 she was admitted
to the Netherlands and granted political asylum on the basis of
escaping an arranged marriage. She later obtained Dutch citizenship,
and was elected to the Dutch parliament, where she served from
2001 through 2006. In 2004, she collaborated with Dutch filmmaker
Theo van Gogh on the short film Submission, about the
abuse of women in Islamic societies. After release of the film,
van Gogh was assassinated, with a note containing a death threat
for Hirsi Ali pinned to his corpse with a knife. Thereupon, she
went into hiding with a permanent security detail to protect
her against ongoing threats. In 2006, she moved to the U.S.,
taking a position at the American Enterprise Institute. She is
currently a Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

In this short book (or long pamphlet: it is just 105 pages,
with 70 pages of main text), Hirsi Ali argues that almost all
Western commentators on the threat posed by Islam have
fundamentally misdiagnosed the nature of the challenge it
poses to Western civilisation and the heritage of the Enlightenment,
and, failing to understand the tactics of Islam's ambition to
dominate the world, dating to Mohammed's revelations in
Medina and his actions in that period of his life, have
adopted strategies which are ineffective and in some cases
counterproductive in confronting the present danger.

The usual picture of Islam presented by politicians and
analysts in the West (at least those who admit there is any
problem at all) is that most Muslims are peaceful, productive
people who have no problems becoming integrated in Western
societies, but there is a small minority, variously called
“radical”, “militant”, “Islamist”,
“fundamentalist”, or other names, who are bent
on propagating their religion by means of violence, either in
guerrilla or conventional wars, or by terror attacks on
civilian populations. This view has led to involvement in
foreign wars, domestic surveillance, and often intrusive internal
security measures to counter the threat, which is often given
the name of “jihad”. A dispassionate analysis of these
policies over the last decade and a half must conclude that
they are not working: despite trillions of dollars spent and
thousands of lives lost, turning air travel into a humiliating
and intimidating circus, and invading the privacy of people
worldwide, the Islamic world seems to be, if anything,
more chaotic than it was in the year 2000, and the frequency and
seriousness of so-called “lone wolf” terrorist attacks
against soft targets does not seem to be abating. What if we
don't really understand what we're up against? What if
jihad isn't the problem, or only a part of something much
larger?

Dawa (or
dawah,
da'wah,
daawa,
daawah—there doesn't
seem to be anything associated with this religion which
isn't transliterated at least three different ways—the
Arabic is
“دعوة”)
is an Arabic word which literally means “invitation”.
In the context of Islam, it is usually translated as
“proselytising” or spreading the religion
by nonviolent means, as is done by missionaries of many
other religions. But here, Hirsi Ali contends that dawa,
which is grounded in the fundamental scripture of Islam: the
Koran and Hadiths (sayings of Mohammed), is something very
different when interpreted and implemented by what she
calls “political Islam”. As opposed to a
distinction between moderate and radical Islam, she argues
that Islam is more accurately divided into “spiritual
Islam” as revealed in the earlier Mecca suras of the
Koran, and “political Islam”, embodied by those
dating from Medina. Spiritual Islam defines a belief system,
prayers, rituals, and duties of believers, but is largely
confined to the bounds of other major religions. Political
Islam, however, is a comprehensive system of politics, civil
and criminal law, economics, the relationship with and treatment
of nonbelievers, and military strategy, and imposes a duty to
spread Islam into new territories.

Seen through the lens of political Islam, dawa and those
engaged in it, often funded today by the deep coffers of
petro-tyrannies, is nothing like the activities of, say,
Roman Catholic or Mormon missionaries. Implemented through
groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), centres on Islamic and Middle East studies on
university campuses, mosques and Islamic centres in
communities around the world, so-called “charities”
and non-governmental organisations, all bankrolled by
fundamentalist champions of political Islam, dawa in the
West operates much like the apparatus of Communist subversion
described almost sixty years ago by J. Edgar Hoover in
Masters of Deceit.
You have the same pattern of apparently nonviolent and
innocuously-named front organisations, efforts to influence
the influential (media figures, academics, politicians),
infiltration of institutions along the lines of
Antonio Gramsci's
“long march”, exploitation of Western traditions
such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion to
achieve goals diametrically opposed to them, and redefinition of
the vocabulary and intimidation of any who dare state self-evident
facts (mustn't be called “islamophobic”!), all funded
from abroad. Unlike communists in the heyday of the
Comintern
and afterward the Cold War, Islamic subversion is assisted by
large scale migration of Muslims into Western countries, especially
in Europe, where the organs of dawa encourage them to form their
own separate communities, avoiding assimilation, and demanding
the ability to implement their own sharia law and that others
respect their customs. Dawa is directed at these immigrants as
well, with the goal of increasing their commitment to Islam and
recruiting them for its political agenda: the eventual replacement
of Western institutions with sharia law and submission to a global
Islamic caliphate. This may seem absurdly ambitious for communities
which, in most countries, aren't much greater than 5% of the
population, but they're patient: they've been at it for fourteen
centuries, and they're out-breeding the native populations in
almost every country where they've become established.

Hirsi Ali argues persuasively that the problem isn't jihad:
jihad is a tactic which can be employed as part of
dawa when persuasion, infiltration, and subversion prove
insufficient, or as a final step to put the conquest over the
top, but it's the commitment to global hegemony, baked right
into the scriptures of Islam, which poses the most dire risk
to the West, especially since so few decision makers seem to
be aware of it or, if they are, dare not speak candidly of it
lest they be called “islamophobes” or worse. This
is something about which I don't need to be persuaded: I've been
writing about it since 2015; see
“Clash of
Ideologies: Communism, Islam, and the West”. I
sincerely hope that this work by an eloquent observer who has
seen political Islam from the inside will open more eyes to the
threat it poses to the West. A reasonable set of policy
initiatives to confront the threat is presented at the end.
The only factual error I noted is the claim on p. 57 that
Joseph R. McCarthy was in charge of the House Committee on
Un-American Activities—in fact, McCarthy, a Senator,
presided over the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

This is a publication of the Hoover Institution. It has no ISBN
and cannot be purchased through usual booksellers. Here is the
page
for the book, whence you can
download
the PDF file for free.

One of the more fascinating sub-genres of science fiction is
“world building”: creating the setting in which a
story takes place by imagining an environment radically
different from any in the human experience. This can
run the gamut from life in the atmosphere of a gas giant
planet (Saturn Rukh),
on the surface of a neutron star
(Dragon's Egg),
or on an enormous alien-engineered wheel surrounding a
star (Ringworld). When
done well, the environment becomes an integral part of
the tale, shaping the characters and driving the plot.
Greg Egan is one of the most accomplished of world builders.
His fiction includes numerous examples of alien environments,
with the consequences worked out and woven into the story.

The present novel may be his most ambitious yet: a world in which
the fundamental properties of spacetime are different from those
in our universe. Unfortunately, for this reader, the execution
was unequal to the ambition and the result disappointing. I'll
explain this in more detail, but let's start with the basics.

We inhabit a spacetime which is well-approximated by
Minkowski
space. (In regions where gravity is strong, spacetime
curvature must be taken into account, but this can be neglected
in most circumstances including those in this novel.)
Minkowski space is a flat four-dimensional space where each
point is identified by three space and one time coordinate.
It is thus spoken of as a 3+1 dimensional space. The space
and time dimensions are not interchangeable: when computing
the spacetime separation of two events, their distance or
spacetime
interval is given by the quantity
−t²+x²+y²+z².
Minkowski space is said to have a
metric
signature of (−,+,+,+), from the signs of the four
coordinates in the distance (metric) equation.

Why does our universe have a dimensionality of 3+1? Nobody
knows—string theorists who argue for a
landscape of universes in an infinite multiverse
speculate that the very dimensionality of a universe may be
set randomly when the baby universe is created in
its own big bang bubble. Max Tegmark
has argued that
universes with other dimensionalities would not permit the
existence of observers such as us, so we shouldn't be surprised
to find ourselves in one of the universes which is compatible
with our own existence, nor should we rule out a multitude of
other universes with different dimensionalities, all of which
may be devoid of observers.

But need they necessarily be barren? The premise of this novel
is, “not necessarily so”, and Egan has created a
universe with a metric signature of (−,−,+,+),
a 2+2 dimensional spacetime with two spacelike dimensions and two
timelike dimensions. Note that “timelike” refers
to the sign of the dimension in the distance equation, and the
presence of two timelike dimensions is not equivalent to
two time dimensions. There is still a single dimension
of time, t, in which events occur in a linear order
just as in our universe. The second timelike dimension,
which we'll call u, behaves like a spatial dimension
in that objects can move within it as they can along the
other x and y spacelike dimensions, but its
contribution in the distance equation is negative:
−t²−u²+x²+y².
This results in a seriously weird, if not bizarre world.

From this point on, just about everything I'm going to say can
be considered a spoiler if your intention is to read the book
from front to back and not consult the
extensive
background information on the
author's Web site.
Conversely, I shall give away nothing regarding the plot or
ending which is not disclosed in the background information
or the technical afterword of the novel. I do not consider
this material as spoilers; in fact, I believe that many readers
who do not first understand the universe in which the story is
set are likely to abandon the book as simply incomprehensible.
Some of the masters of world building science fiction introduce
the reader to the world as an ongoing puzzle as the story
unfolds but, for whatever reason, Egan did not choose to do
that here, or else he did so sufficiently poorly that this reader
didn't even notice the attempt. I think the publisher made a
serious mistake in not alerting the reader to the existence of
the technical afterword, the reading of which I consider a barely
sufficient prerequisite for understanding the setting in which
the novel takes place.

In the Dichronauts universe, there is a
“world” around which a smaller ”star”
orbits (or maybe the other way around; it's just a coordinate
transformation). The geometry of the spacetime dominates
everything. While in our universe we're free to move in any of
the three spatial dimensions, in this spacetime motion in the
x and y dimensions is as for us, but if
you're facing in the positive x dimension—let's
call it east—you cannot rotate outside the wedge from
northeast to southeast, and as you rotate the distance equation
causes a stretching to occur, like the distortions in
relativistic motion in special relativity. It is no more
possible to turn all the way to the northeast than it is to
attain the speed of light in our universe. If you were born
east-facing, the only way you can see to the west is to bend
over and look between your legs. The beings who inhabit this
world seem to be born randomly east- or west-facing.

Light only propagates within the cone defined by the spacelike
dimensions. Any light source has a “dark cone”
defined by a 45° angle around the timelike u
dimension. In this region, vision does not work, so beings are
blind to their sides. The creatures who inhabit the world are
symbionts of bipeds who call themselves “walkers”
and slug-like creatures, “siders”, who live inside
their skulls and receive their nutrients from the walker's
bloodstream. Siders are equipped with “pingers”,
which use echolocation like terrestrial bats to sense within the
dark cone. While light cannot propagate there, physical objects
can move in that direction, including the density waves which
carry sound. Walkers and siders are linked at the brain level
and can directly perceive each other's views of the world and
communicate without speaking aloud. Both symbiotes are
independently conscious, bonded at a young age, and can, like
married couples, have acrimonious disputes. While walkers
cannot turn outside the 90° cone, they can move in
the timelike north-south direction by “sidling”,
relying upon their siders to detect obstacles within their cone
of blindness.

Due to details of the structure of their world, the walker/sider
society, which seems to be at a pre-industrial level (perhaps
due to the fact that many machines would not work in the weird
geometry they inhabit), is forced to permanently migrate to stay
within the habitable zone between latitudes which are seared by the
rays of the star and those too cold for agriculture. For many
generations, the town of Baharabad has migrated along a river, but
now the river appears to be drying up, creating a crisis. Seth (walker)
and Theo (sider), are surveyors, charged with charting the course of
their community's migration. Now they are faced with the challenge
of finding a new river to follow, one which has not already been
claimed by another community. On an expedition to the limits of
the habitable zone, they encounter what seems to be the edge of
the world. Is it truly the edge, and if not what lies beyond? They
join a small group of explorers who probe regions of their world
never before seen, and discover clues to the origin of their species.

This didn't work for me. If you read all of the background
information first (which, if you're going to dig into this
novel, I strongly encourage you to do), you'll appreciate the
effort the author went to in order to create a mathematically
consistent universe with two timelike dimensions, and to work
out the implications of this for a world within it and the
beings who live there. But there is a tremendous amount of arm
waving behind the curtain which, if you peek, subverts the
plausibility of everything. For example, the walker/sider
creatures are described as having what seems to be a relatively
normal metabolism: they eat fruit, grow crops, breathe, eat, and
drink, urinate and defecate, and otherwise behave as biological
organisms. But biology as we know it, and all of these
biological functions, requires the complex stereochemistry of the
organic molecules upon which organisms are built. If the motion
of molecules were constrained to a cone, and their shape
stretched with rotation, the operation of enzymes and other
biochemistry wouldn't work. And yet that doesn't seem to be a
problem for these beings.

Finally, the story simply stops in the middle, with the great
adventure and resolution of the central crisis unresolved.
There will probably be a sequel. I shall not read it.

This is the second novel in the authors' “High Ground”
series, chronicling the exploits of Charles Knight, an entrepreneur
and adventurer determined to live his life according to his own
moral code, constrained as little as possible by the rules and
regulations of coercive and corrupt governments. The first
novel, Speculator (October 2016),
follows Charles's adventures in Africa as an investor in a
junior gold exploration company which just might have made
the discovery of the century, and in the financial markets as he
seeks to profit from what he's learned digging into the details.
Charles comes onto the radar of ambitious government agents seeking
to advance their careers by collecting his scalp.

Charles ends up escaping with his freedom and ethics intact, but
with much of his fortune forfeit. He decides he's had enough of
“the land of the free” and sets out on his sailboat
to explore the world and sample the pleasures and opportunities
it holds for one who thinks for himself.
Having survived several attempts on his life and prevented a war
in Africa in the previous novel, seven years later he returns to a
really dangerous place, Washington DC, populated by
the Morlocks of Mordor.

Charles has an idea for a new business. The crony capitalism of
the U.S. pharmaceutical-regulatory complex has inflated the price
of widely-used prescription drugs to many times that paid
outside the U.S., where these drugs, whose patents have expired
under legal regimes less easily manipulated than that of the U.S.,
are manufactured in a chemically-identical form by thoroughly
professional generic drug producers. Charles understands, as fully
as any engineer, that wherever there is nonlinearity the possibility
for gain exists, and when that nonlinearity is the result of the
action of coercive government, the potential profits from circumventing
its grasp on the throat of the free market can be very large,
indeed.

When Charles's boat docked in the U.S., he had an undeclared cargo:
a large number of those little blue pills much in demand by men
of a certain age, purchased for pennies from a factory in India through
a cut-out in Africa he met on his previous adventure. He has the
product, and a supplier able to obtain much more. Now, all he needs
is distribution. He must venture into the dark underside of DC to
make the connections that can get the product to the customers, and
persuade potential partners that they can make much more and far more
safely by distributing his products (which don't fall under the
purview of the Drug Enforcement Agency, and to which local cops not only
don't pay much attention, but may be potential customers).

Meanwhile, Charles's uncle Maurice, who has been managing what was
left of his fortune during his absence, has made an investment in
a start-up pharmaceutical company, Visioryme, whose first product,
VR-210, or Sybillene, is threading its way through the FDA regulatory
gauntlet toward approval for use as an antidepressant. Sybillene works
through a novel neurochemical pathway, and promises to be an effective
treatment for clinical depression while avoiding the many deleterious
side effects of other drugs. In fact, Sybillene doesn't appear to
have any side effects at all—or hardly any—there's that
one curious thing that happened in animal testing, but not wishing
to commit corporate seppuku, Visioryme hasn't mentioned it to the
regulators or even their major investor, Charles.

Charles pursues his two pharmaceutical ventures in parallel: one in the
DC ghetto and Africa; the other in the tidy suburban office park
where Visioryme is headquartered. The first business begins to
prosper, and Charles must turn his ingenuity to solving the problems
attendant to any burgeoning enterprise: supply, transportation,
relations with competitors (who, in this sector of the economy,
not only are often armed but inclined to shoot first), expanding
the product offerings, growing the distribution channels, and
dealing with all of the money that's coming in, entirely in cash,
without coming onto the radar of any of the organs of the slavers
and their pervasive snooper-state.

Meanwhile, Sybillene finally obtains FDA approval, and Visioryme begins
to take off and ramp up production. Charles's connections in Africa
help the company obtain the supplies of bamboo required in production
of the drug. It seems like he now has two successful ventures, on
the dark and light sides, respectively, of the pharmaceutical
business (which is dark and which is light depending on your view
of the FDA).

Then, curious reports start to come in about doctors prescribing
Sybillene off-label in large doses to their well-heeled
patients. Off-label prescription is completely legal and not
uncommon, but one wonders what's going on. Then there's the talk
Charles is picking up from his other venture of demand for
a new drug on the street: Sybillene, which goes under names such
as Fey, Vatic, Augur, Covfefe, and most commonly, Naked Emperor.
Charles's lead distributor reports, “It helps people see
lies for what they are, and liars too. I dunno. I never tried
it. Lots of people are asking though. Society types. Lawyers,
businessmen, doctors, even cops.” It appears that
Sybillene, or Naked Emperor, taken in a high dose, is a powerful
nootropic which doesn't so much increase intelligence as, the
opposite of most psychoactive drugs, allows the user to think
more clearly, and see through the deception that
pollutes the intellectual landscape of a modern,
“developed”, society.

In that fœtid city by the Potomac, the threat posed by such
clear thinking dwarfs that of other “controlled
substances” which merely turn their users into zombies.
Those atop an empire built on deceit, deficits, and debt cannot
run the risk of a growing fraction of the population beginning to
see through the funny money, Ponzi financing, Potemkin
military, manipulation of public opinion, erosion of
the natural rights of citizens, and the sham which is replacing
the last vestiges of consensual government. Perforce, Sybillene must
become Public Enemy Number One, and if a bit of lying and
even murder is required, well, that's the price of preserving
the government's ability to lie and murder.

Suddenly, Charles is involved in two illegal pharmaceutical
ventures. As any wise entrepreneur would immediately ask himself,
“might there be synergies?”

Thus begins a compelling, instructive, and inspiring tale of
entrepreneurship and morality confronted with dark forces constrained
by no limits whatsoever. We encounter friends and foes from the first
novel, as once again Charles finds himself on point position
defending those in the enterprises he has created. As I said in my
review of Speculator, this book reminds me of
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead,
but it is even more effective because Charles Knight is not a
super-hero but rather a person with a strong sense of right and
wrong who is making up his life as he goes along and learning
from the experiences he has: good and bad, success and failure.
Charles Knight, even without Naked Emperor, has that gift of seeing
things precisely as they are, unobscured by the fog, cant, spin, and
lies which are the principal products of the city in which it is set.

These novels are not just page-turning thrillers, they're
simultaneously an introductory course in becoming an international
man (or woman), transcending the lies of the increasingly obsolescent
nation-state, and finding the liberty that comes from seizing control
of one's own destiny. They may be the most powerful fictional
recruiting tool for the libertarian and anarcho-capitalist world
view since the works of Ayn Rand and
L. Neil Smith.
Speculator was my fiction
book of the year
for 2016, and this sequel is in the running for 2017.